|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| . | |||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rangefinder
Magazine Profile: Jim DiVitale by Steve Anchell
Jim is one of those photographers who knew exactly what he wanted to do starting in high school. Running out of art classes in the tenth grade, he found himself adept at photography. His photography teacher asked him to turn in some photographs for the state fair at the end of the semester. His pictures not only won the state fair but they also went on from Florida to Washington, D.C., and hung in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “I received a letter from my congressman, saying ‘Your pictures are hanging in Washington.’ I decided right then and there I wanted to be a photographer.” By the time he was a senior in high school, he began searching for a school for advertising photography. Following junior college, where he took courses in fine art photography, he attended the Art Institute in Atlanta. The AIA brought in A high-end photography teacher from New York that had a lot of experience shooting New York-style advertising photography.
“I’m not a scientist. I look at the file and say: Is this something I can blow up to 20x30? Is this going to be a double-page annual report cover and hold together? Would I feel every bit as comfortable with this as I do with 8x10 transparency? At first, the work was not 100 percent digital, some of it still had to be done on film. Eventually the client decided the separator could do it for half the price. Characteristically, Jim turned what could have been a devastating defeat into a success story. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me in my career, because it forced me out of the safety net of having a big catalog. I had to go back to individual accounts, and I had all this digital camera equipment and the knowledge of how to use it. I had a couple of thousand digital shots under my belt, so I decided to go after the advertising market and the design firm market and show them what digital capture is all about. At this point nobody was doing digital. Only one or two people in all of Atlanta had any kind of digital capture going.”
Jim started showing his digital work to ad agency execs. Ad execs that would have been impossible to get appointments with were suddenly very eager to meet Jim. “I’d call J. Walter Thompson and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jim DiVitale, and I’d like for your production department to come in for a demonstration on digital capture.’ They’d bring in the whole department. I’d show them some stuff, and all of a sudden these agencies were giving me jobs. And it took off from there.” While still at Three Score, Jim found his second calling: teaching. The newly hired manager of Three Score, Steve Best, was asked to do a presentation at the Art Institute of Atlanta. He asked Jim, as senior photographer, to make the presentation. Jim immediately found it very natural talking to the students.
“I’m at a point now where I’m not as much into the competition as the teaching. I am on a major teaching thing. I have close to 15 speaking engagements set up for this year. A lot of them are week-long. “I find myself splitting my year between running my advertising studio in Atlanta, being on the road teaching for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and for Dean Collins, and doing things for PPA and its affiliates. So it’s quite a busy schedule—balancing the teaching with a dozen clients that require me, at a moment’s notice, to do everything they need done. This year is going to be the hardest I’ve ever had.”
“It’s a really interesting way to educate people. A major part of my direction is creating all brand new training CDs for Photoshop CS. They’re very tough to do. It takes hours to make a movie that is just a few minutes long. It’s a balance between shooting for my regular accounts, being on the road doing my lectures, and creating these training CDs. And, of course, I write a monthly column for Photoshop User.” This is the first year Jim will be gone more than a week at a time. His 10 top clients know his schedule, so they can plan around it. Even so, Jim has a staff of freelance people that he’s used over the years. Using a combination of the Internet, the Mac iSight camera, and an FTP site, Jim can download any days’ work, anywhere in the world, review it, retouch it, and re-post it for the client.
As a teacher, Jim’s goal is to take all the things he’s learned in the last 10 years and educate portrait, wedding and event photographers on how to deal with all the digital problems, how to expose correctly, how to process with the least amount of work and how to use Photoshop actions and batch processing.
Jim calls his style of Photoshop “The Way of the Fast Retreat.” The title comes from art directors who have the right to change their mind five minutes before going to press. It means he needs to be able to undo every change he makes—back to the beginning, if necessary—so he can take an image in a different direction without causing additional work. That means never throwing away a mask and never throwing away a layer. If he makes a color correction, he color correct to a new layer.
On location Jim uses the Leaf back on a motorized Hasselblad ELM system or the Fuji S2 digital SLR. In the studio he uses the Leaf Valeo 11 and 6, and the multi–shot DCB2 on the Fuji GX680, one dedicated to each back. This allows him to have multiple sets going. Every camera has its own workstation on a cart that can move around the studio.
According to Jim, it is important to network with other photographers. “In the past, photographers had a tendency to not talk about technique because they were afraid somebody would steal their clients. When digital came out, it got everybody talking. Commercial photographers began sharing a little more. The two to three high-end
This year Jim DiVitale will be speaking at Photoshop World East and West, PEI Magazine Live and Orvieto Photografia in Italy. He will be leading workshops at the Institute of Visual Arts in Maui, the West Coast School in San Diego, and speaking in multiple U.S. cities on a Dean Collins’ Software Cinema Photoshop Training Camp Live tour. To see more of his work or find out about his workshops, visit www.divitalephoto.com/. Steve Anchell is internationally published fine art photographer. He has been a contributing editor to Outdoor Photographer, Camera & Darkroom and PhotoWork magazines. His published works include The Darkroom Cookbook, The Variable Contrast Printing Manual and the recently released, The Film Developing Cookbook. He currently conducts private workshops at his home in Southern Colorado and group workshops throughout the country. For information call (719) 256-4157.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
“In my line of work, the client demands such perfection that I have to work twice as hard to give them what they require. Anything less is not acceptable to them,” says Jim DiVitale.
In 1978, Jim graduated and decided to stay in Atlanta, working his way through all the various types of thing one does to get his own studio. Jim worked in a darkroom, then as an assistant for Three Score, a catalog house owned by Andy Foster—who later became executive director of PPA. At the time, Three Score was a 10-man operation. When Jim left in 1985, Three Score had 150 employees. By the time Jim left to open his own studio, he had risen through the ranks to become senior photographer—doing everything from jewelry to housewares, people to locations, furniture to electronics—all with large–format film cameras. “From the beginning, I was involved with large format. I had my own 8x10 view camera by the time I was a senior in high school. Working for Andy Foster, it was all 8x10, or 4x5 at the smallest, for catalog reproduction.”
In 1993 Jim began to make the change from film to digital. One of his large clients, an office products catalog distributor, decided to go digital. An advance of $25,000 on the next year’s catalogs allowed Jim to buy a Leaf DCB-1 camera system and a Mac Quadra 950 with a blazing 64MB of RAM. “I started with the Leaf backs and had grown with them over the years. The software is Scitex technology. Scitex was writing the software long before anyone was shooting digital. That’s why the Leaf back is so superior to any of the other products. The chips are generally the same across the board. This one’s octagon, this one’s square, whatever.
If the answer is yes, then that’s what I’m going to use. If the answer is no, I would shoot film and scan it.”
Soon, he was asked to teach commercial lighting and color printing, and view camera in the night program. At about the same time Three Score started Jim in PPA, paying for his membership and competition fees. Since that time, Jim has been very involved with competition, not only with PPA but also with Graphis and PDN digital imaging awards. He has won so often he no longer has any room to display them all.
In addition to live teaching engagements, Jim has created a series of Photoshop training CDs for Dean Collins for “training camps” in the U.S. and Europe. The teachers aren’t actually at these camps. The sessions are prerecorded lessons, so students can get the same instruction at a fraction of the cost.
“My clients are buying iSight cameras now. We can communicate over the web, use FTP, and set up instant web galleries where we post images. The client doesn’t have to be on the set anymore, even the ones in town don’t come to the set. They just art direct from their own desktops. Eventually, I can live anywhere in the country, but right now I’m staying in Atlanta.”
“Now that digital cameras take great pictures, all types of photographers are jumping on board and having problems because they’re used to shooting negative film, not transparency. The new digital capture is so sensitive to exposure that photographers are having all kinds of contrast problems. They end up using Photoshop to fix things, rather than getting it right from the start and then using Photoshop to enhance images. So I’m developing programs to teach that line. All the classes I’m getting ready to teach have a lot more to do with portraiture than advertising.”
“Everything is totally separate. If I made a black and white, it would be a black and white adjustment layer. I would never throw the color information away. When the client says, I know we decided it was going to be black and white, but now we’ve decided to go back to color, all I have to do is turn off a layer. I don’t have to go back and say, ‘I can’t believe I did all this retouching to the black and white shot, and now we have to go back and start over.’
While many photographers shoot funneling their images into one network, Jim uses a 2Ghz dual processor G5 Mac tower, which is the main retouching station. He can sit there and do the retouching, put the images into folders, in galleries, send them off to clients. Or, if he’s working by himself, he can have multiple jobs going at once.
digital users in Atlanta talk all the time. We even share equipment. If something goes down I can go to Kevin Ames and borrow a camera. If something breaks on his end he can come to me. We share technique because that helps us become better as a whole.
“The two things I always recommend to people is find other people in your area that are also Photoshop users or shoot with the same type of camera as you and try to meet once in awhile and trade ideas. Keep up with your professional associations, such as WPPI, PPA, APA and ASMP. Also, I highly recommend the National Association of Photoshop Professionals to everyone.”